The easiest way to understand Pokémon is as a major factor in the U.S.-Japanese balance of trade.
Roger Ebert, review of Pokémon: The First Movie
This holiday shopping season presents — pun intended — the perfect opportunity to wrap up — pun intended — this Substack’s four-part history of Pokémon. After examining the phenomenon’s cultural and personal background, the development of the first Pokémon games and the proliferation of Pokémon across multiple media in Japan, the logical next step would be to cross the Pacific and that’s exactly what I propose to do.
This post will offer a history of the Pokémon phenomenon in the United States, focusing on the waning years of the 20th century and ending with Pokémon’s expansion to almost every other market on the planet. This nostalgic journey (nostalgic for me, at least) will encompass the cartoon, the black market in trading cards, the various strains of moral handwringing from media commentators and, of course, two colossally commercial Christmases.
A quick note before we begin: one finds several variations in the spelling of ‘Pokémon’ in contemporary coverage of the then-new phenomenon, including the accent-less ‘Pokemon,’ ‘Pokeman,’ ‘Pokemans’ and ‘Pokimon.’ I’ve standardized all of these to ‘Pokémon’ in this post.
I. Gesamtspielzeug
The Pokémon phenomenon signals what appears to be the new, millennial trend in children’s marketing: an all-fronts, all-media assault, in which advertising, product and usage are nearly indistinguishable.
-Rick Levin, 1999 The Stranger article
Despite the seizure incident and the ensuing global notoriety, Nintendo and Game Freak pressed on with their plans to export Pokémon to North America. The incredible success of the Sony PlayStation, which launched in North America in December 1995, had relegated Nintendo to second place in that market and Pokémon — a true phenomenon and $4 billion industry in its native Japan — must have seemed like the perfect secret weapon in the new console war.
The first step, as previously mentioned, would be a renaming. Due to legal action from the makers of the now-obscure Monster in My Pocket toy line, which spawned its own licensed NES game, Nintendo and Game Freak condensed Pocket Monsters into one copyrightable word, Pokémon, which would remain its name throughout its global expansion.
In Japan, as I’ve covered in a previous post, Pokémon had grown from a pair of Game Boy games to encompass trading cards, multiple manga series, a television show and a massively successful toy line over several years. In America, Pokémon would always already be a multimedia empire. In the words of Nintendo of America executive Gail Tilden, “We decided to make an all-out effort to repeat the phenomenon in the Western world."
Forming strategic partnerships with Hasbro, KFC, 4Kids Entertainment, VIZ Media and Wizards of the Coast, Nintendo settled on fall/winter 1998 as the right time to bring Pokémon to the American market, building up to that year’s holiday shopping season with what the Los Angeles Times would characterize as a “relentless, nine-month publicity drive.” (American commentators criticized the Pokémon anime in particular as a glorified toy commercial well before it debuted on American television.)
The $25 million marketing campaign included Pikachu-shaped Volkswagens touring the country and a promotional VHS called A Sneak Peek at Pokémon, a mix of anime footage and truly nineties live-action segments. Nintendo’s own magazine Nintendo Power, which had a U.S. circulation of approximately 650,000 in 1998, extensively promoted Pokémon, both in its own pages and in the accompanying Pokémon Power spinoff.
In a May 1998 Wall Street Journal article about the then-upcoming Pokémon invasion, Joseph Pereira writes that “the U.S. marketing interest in Pokémon shows a new respect for Japanese children's products” after long doubts about Japanese media’s ability to break into America. Pereira identifies two massively successful Japanese imports, Tamagotchi and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, as paving the way for this marketing interest.
I’ve already covered Tamagotchi in a previous post. The Bandai digital pet was launched in North America in 1997 and became that year’s children’s toy phenomenon, complete with bans at elementary schools and concerned newspaper articles about its possible impact on children’s academic performance and mental health.
Power Rangers was the brainchild of Israeli-American impresario Haim Saban, who spent the eighties and early nineties composing and producing music for children’s TV shows – notably Inspector Gadget and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe – and trying to sell television networks on an American adaptation of the long-running Japanese superhero series Super Sentai, one that would combine the original Japanese masked heroes with newly shot footage of American teens as their secret civilian identities.
The young Fox Broadcasting Company finally picked up the show in the early nineties, broadcasting the first episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in 1993. Despite skepticism and a less-than-warm reception from television critics, the show quickly became a massive hit, attracting millions of young viewers.
By the very next year, Power Rangers was an almost $1 billion dollar industry and the most popular action figure line in the United States. In a December 1994 article, “With Power Rangers Scarce, a Frenzied Search by Parents,” New York Times writer Glenn Collins describes scenes that evoke Tamagotchi and foreshadow the Beanie Baby, Furby and Pokémon phenomena:
Now, desperate to avoid disappointing their children on Christmas morning, some parents are driving to out-of-the-way toy stores that have managed, word has it, to obtain a cache of Power Rangers. Some have offered as much as $100 to clerks in toy stores to put aside hard-to-get Rangers.
Collins goes on to quote Toys “R” Us executive Michael Goldstein, who calls Power Rangers “the biggest phenomenon we have ever seen in the toy business.”
Most American toymakers, Pereira writes in the Wall Street Journal, passed on Power Rangers because of serious doubts about the show’s potential for success; led by Hasbro, they jumped on the Pokémon license for fear of making the same mistake twice.
In addition to Tamagotchi and Power Rangers, I can identify three other key factors in and influences on the Pokémon phenomenon’s smooth translation to a new market. First, Nintendo’s own incredible pre-Pokémon success: the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64. Pokémon Red and Blue would not have become million-selling Game Boy games if Nintendo had not already sold millions of Game Boys.
Just as important, the merchandising success of Mario, Donkey Kong and other Nintendo properties created connections with American toymakers, children’s television broadcasters, junk food manufacturers, fast food restaurants and other potential Pokémon licensees; Pokémon would take full advantage of this groundwork.
Second, anime’s growing American popularity made American networks more open to the idea of airing Pokémon. “While Japanese anime has long had a cult following in the United States,” Evelyn Iritani writes in a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, “it has now exploded into a $60 million-a-year business.” (This number would of course grow exponentially in the next few years.)
Dragon Ball/Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon had already become American children’s television staples by 1998; at around the same time as Pokémon debuted in North America, Cartoon Network launched a dedicated anime programming block, Toonami, featuring Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Voltron and Robotech. In turn, Pokémon itself would act as an anime gateway drug for many young viewers, fueling a further expansion in popularity that continues to this day.
Finally, the United States had its own homegrown children’s multimedia empire in addition to these Japanese imports: the Disney Renaissance of the late eighties and early to mid-nineties, which encompassed box office hits; their direct-to-video sequels; spinoff amusement park rides, parades and costumed characters; tie-in toys with fast food kids’ meals; the Disney Channel, Radio Disney and Disney Interactive (née Walt Disney Computer Software, Inc.) This is the company that pioneered synergy, first in practice and then as a concept, and Pokémon certainly followed in its footsteps.
II. Christmas 1998 to Christmas 1999
Watch out Furby. Get a life Beanie Babies. Pokémon now rules.
Thanks in part to another hit movie, Pokémon items are disappearing from the shelves faster than you can say, ‘I choose you, Pikachu.’ As many as one in five of the toys, games and books given to children this holiday season, which the industry counts on for its profits, will be based on Pokémon.
-Terry Pristin, 1999 New York Times article
English translations of Pokémon Red and Blue would be released on September 28th, three weeks after a dubbed version of the Pokémon anime debuted on American television. November would see the North American release of the Game Boy Color, KFC kid’s meals with Pokémon toys, the Pokémon Pikachu step counter, and the first English-language issue of The Electric Tale of Pikachu.
Of course, changes would be made to tailor Pokémon to American audiences. To their credit (and to their ultimate financial advantage), Game Freak fought back against proposals to redesign the Pokémon themselves into tougher, more intimidating creatures that would supposedly be more appealing to American boys; many commentators would later identify Pokémon’s appeal to both boys and girls as a major factor in its success.
The majority of the original 151 Pokémon would be renamed. Zenigame became Squirtle, Rokon became Vulpix and Kameil became Wartortle. About a third kept their original names, including Butterfree, Pikachu, Nidoran, Starmie, Mew and Mewtwo.
The human characters’ names were also Americanized. Of the eight gym leaders, for instance, only Erika kept her Japanese name in English. The rivals Satoshi and Shigeru became Ash Ketchum and Gary Oak. Similarly, all of the cities and other points of interest on the world map were given new English-language names, themed, like their Japanese counterparts, after various colors; Nibi (dull gray) City became Pewter City, Yamabuki (golden-colored) City became Saffron City and Guren-jima (“crimson island”) became Cinnabar Island.
The Game Boy games also saw a few more idiosyncratic changes en route to American stores. In Viridian City, at the beginning of the game, the English-language player’s path is blocked by an old man who eventually gets out of the way after drinking his morning coffee; the original Japanese character is passed out from a night of drinking and needs to sober up. The in-game currency was changed from the real-life Japanese yen to the fictitious Pokédollar.
4Kids Entertainment localized the Pokémon anime for the North American market; Pokémon would be the first in a lengthy series of anime series they would license and dub into English, series such as Dinosaur King, Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, One Piece, Shaman King and Yu-Gi-Oh! The English-language dub of Pokémon has become notorious for the extent to which its translators attempted to eliminate all references to Japanese culture, a trend that reached memetic proportions with how characters insistently refer to onigiri as sandwiches or jelly donuts.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the Pokémon anime’s localization, the long-running fansite Dogasu’s Backpack maintains a comprehensive database of the changes made to each episode and movie.)
According to a December 1998 Los Angeles Times article, Pokémon quickly became the nation’s top syndicated children’s show, with before-school broadcasts attracting more viewers than CBS Morning News in the Los Angeles area. “Electronics chains and toy stores are selling out entire Pokémon shipments on the day the games arrive,” reporter Denise Gellene writes. “Best Buy has been handing out rain checks for Pokémon since mid-November.”
Pokémon Red and Blue sold approximately 4 million copies between September 28th and the end of 1998, becoming by far the year’s best-selling video games. (In comparison, the Nintendo 64’s biggest 1998 hits, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye 007, sold approximately 2.5 and 2.3 million copies, respectively.)
1999 saw American Pokémon’s equivalent of the Cambrian explosion:
In January, Nintendo licensee and Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast introduced the United States to the Pokémon Trading Card Game, which would, like baseball and basketball cards before it, create an economy of its own. To quote a Baltimore Sun review of Pokémon: The First Movie, these are the cards that “turned a generation of youngsters into thieves, mercenaries and compulsive gamblers.”
In March, the anime Digimon Adventure premiers on Fox Kids. While Digimon began as a spinoff of Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pets, both American audiences and Bandai/Toei’s own American licensees perceive it as ersatz Pokémon.
“When Pokémon blew the doors off, we said, ‘okay, the genre’s working, what do we have to fit?’” Fox/Saban executive Elie Dekel would go on to tell BrandWeek. “There was certainly a bit of pure opportunism there. Pokémon created a large, voraciously hungry market that we intend to help supply.”
That same month, sports cards manufacturer Topps announces its own licensed series of collectable Pokémon cards, distinct from Wizards of the Coast’s; Topps’ cards cannot be used to play the Pokémon Trading Card Game.
In April, Nintendo publishes Super Smash Bros., a multiplayer fighting game pitting various Nintendo characters against each other; Pokémon is represented by Pikachu and Jigglypuff. The same month sees the American television debut of Monster Rancher, which airs on Fox Kids and the Sci-Fi Channel. An animated adaptation of the 1997 Tecmo Playstation game of the same name, Monster Rancher is perceived as a clear Pokémon knockoff.
In June, Nintendo publishes Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64, a virtual Pokémon photo safari that challenges players to take the best pictures. In yet another promotional tie-in, players can have these pictures printed at their local Blockbuster.
That same month, Nintendo releases Pokémon Pinball for the Game Boy Color and Wizards of the Coast publishes the First TCG expansion, the Jungle set.
In August, a VIZ Media press releases announces that The Electric Tale of Pikachu has become the first ever manga to top the U.S. comics sales charts after its first ten issues sell a combined 2 million copies.
In September, VIZ Media publishes the first English-language issue of the long-running Pokémon Adventures manga. September also sees the first issue of Beckett Pokémon Collector, essentially a monthly price guide for Pokémon cards modeled on Beckett’s long-running sports cards price guides.
In October, Nintendo releases Pokémon Yellow for the Game Boy; like Red and Blue, it goes on to sell millions of copies. Wizards of the Coast publishes the second TCG expansion, the Fossil set.
In November, Pokémon: The First Movie hits American theaters on Wednesday the 10th and opens at #1 at the box office; this time Burger King, not KFC, distributes tie-in Pokémon toys with its kids’ meals. A special Mew card is given out to moviegoers while supplies last.
Opening day itself is so successful that newspaper reporters coin the term “Pokéflu” to describe the nationwide phenomenon of children calling in sick to school and seeing the movie.
Critics are, for the most part, less than impressed. San Francisco Examiner critic Wesley Morris, for instance, calls it “obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.” Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Robin Rauzi describes the film’s world as “baffling, even somewhat troubling” and its themes “disturbingly unexamined… the whole competition between trainers starts to look like cockfighting, or worse.”
Roger Ebert gives it two stars and describes the story as “thin” compared to Studio Ghibli movies. “I can't recommend the film or work up much enthusiasm for it,” he concludes,
because there is no level at which it enriches a young viewer, by encouraging thinking or observation. It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokémon in general. But I may have completely bypassed the point and misinterpreted crucial Pokémon lore. This may disqualify me from ever becoming a Pokémon Trainer. I can live with that.
The movie ends up making approximately $173 million at the global box office on a $5 million budget and thus becomes the first installment in an extensive cinematic universe.
In December, Pokémon dominates the holiday shopping season. “The year’s hot toy? Anything Pokémon,” writes Terry Pristin in the New York Times. According to the Washington Post, “In the United States alone, 150 companies make more than 1,500 Pokémon products, including macaroni and cheese, ice cream, musical jewelry boxes, chewable vitamins, inflatable furniture and sewing patterns.” This profusion was not limited to the United States. According to a 1999 Montreal Gazette article, more than 150 companies sold more than a thousand licensed Pokémon products in Canada that year.
Pokémon accounted for five of 1999’s six best-selling video games in the United States, as seen in the chart below. Combined, the three mainline Pokémon Game Boy games sold approximately 8.9 million copies. As in Japan, Pokémon had revived the Game Boy in North America, giving it its all-time biggest hit a decade — an eternity in video game years — after its first release.
“In the United States,” Steven L. Kent writes in The Ultimate History of Video Games, “Pokémon sales gave the entire industry a boost. Videogame sales generally drop in transition years in which new hardware systems are released, but U.S. game sales rose by $1 billion in 1999. The rise could be summed up in two words: Game Boy.” Because of Pokémon, Kent writes, U.S. handheld game sales rose from $294 million in 1997 to $466 million in 1998 to more than $1.26 billion in 1999.
Despite this incredible success, Nintendo has never released a mainline Pokémon RPG on a home console. The N64, GameCube, Wii and their successors have seen spin-offs, such as Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Snap and an increasingly large Pokémon presence in the Super Smash Bros. series but no adventures in the Pokémon world involving catching them all and winning gym badges. Instead, Nintendo has stuck to a consistent strategy over the past 25 years: Pokémon as the sales-driving killer app of their handheld consoles.
Thus Pokémon Gold and Silver are the all-time best-selling Game Boy Color games, three Pokémon titles top the all-time Game Boy Advance sales charts, and various Nintendo DS Pokémon games have combined to sell more than 70 million copies. Pokémon games account for three of the four best-selling 3DS titles and have sold more than 100 million copies on the Nintendo Switch. When Nintendo launches the successor to the now-aging Switch (first released in 2017), one can safely assume that Pokémon will dominate its sales charts.
III. Backlash
I used to collect baseball cards, but at least there was a game called baseball, which existed apart from the cards. You don't ‘play’ Pokémon in any sense that involves running around or catching anything or scoring runs or getting dirty. It sounds more like early training for commodities brokers.
-Roger Ebert, review of Pokémon: The First Movie
As both a child’s toy fad and a true cultural phenomenon, Pokémon attracted its share, or more so, of controversy, of critical dismissal and concerned articles about its potential consequences for the youth of America; I began this post with the cover of the December 1999 issue of TIME Magazine, which describes Pokémon as “payback for our get-rich-quick era — with our offspring led away like lemmings by Pied Poke-Pipers of greed.”
While the rest of this post will focus on the various controversies, it is important to note that Pokémon did not receive a uniformly negative reception in the United States.
“Your children are unwittingly demanding a healthy dose of Japanese values,” writes Stephanie Strom in a November 1999 New York Times article. “The cartoon is steeped in traditional Japanese values – responsibility, empathy, cooperation, obedience, respect for elders, humility – that go far beyond its obvious references to things Japanese.” The next year, fellow Times writer Marcelle Clements compares Pokémon (like I have) to “characters from Greek mythology,” writing that
Many adults remain fixated on the violence in Pokémon, but closer scrutiny would perhaps persuade them that conflict is amply accounted for by a clear system of morality in which integrity is rewarded, and honorable heroes are attractive to children. (Thus fulfilling the time-honored terms of fairy tales… which feature an alluring moral hero with whom the child will wish to identify.)
Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Steven L. Kent favorably compares Pokémon to Tamagotchi, a virtual pet that would ‘die’ if not cared for: “Pokémon has real play value and does not traumatize your kids.”
But, of course, moral panics are more fun than these more reasoned takes, so let’s take a look at what specific aspects of the Pokémon phenomenon generated the most controversy.
Undoubtedly, a primary reason for the backlash was Pokémon’s sheer ubiquity. In addition to the previous mentioned Pokémon games, cards, comics, toys movies and television series, an American consumer could buy any of the following Pokémon-branded products at a supermarket in 2000:
Eggo Waffles
Heinz Tomato Ketchup
Heinz Pokémon Pasta Shapes in Tomato Sauce
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese
Life cereal
Nutri-Grain Twists
Poké Gum
Pokémon Easy-Bake Set
Pokémon Gum-Filled Lollipop With Sticker
Pokémon Rolls (IE Fruit by the Foot)
Pokémon Toasted Oat Cereal with Marshmallow Bits
Popsicles
Pop-Tarts
Welch’s Grape Jelly
Thus, the first and most obvious critique is of Pokémon is a theme I’ve covered extensively in this article, spun in a more negative direction: Pokémon as a new, crass low in efficient, synergistic, toyetic marketing to children. Howard Chua-Eoan and Tim Larimer put it this way in their TIME cover story, “Beware the Pokémania:”
Parents who have had to suffer through the games, the TV series and shopping trips can take some comfort in the fact that the Pokémon demographic is the same one that has abandoned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. What may be harder to survive is the relentlessness of Pokémania, a multimedia and interactive barrage like no other before it, with children mesmerized into cataloging a menagerie of multiplicative monsters, with trading cards linked to games linked to television shows linked to toys linked to websites linked to candy linked back to where you started — a pestilential Ponzi scheme.
Two months earlier, the New York Times published an article titled “Lamentations of an Impoverished Poké-Mom.” In it, the titular mother describes her son’s growing and growingly expensive Pokémon obsession, writing that “I might as well have said, ‘open my wallet and take everything.’”
According to many commentators, Pokémon’s creators and American licensees transmitted their own greed to American children, especially in the form of Pokémon cards, creating a pseudo-economy comparable to the stock market or to gambling. Roger Ebert, as seen above, likened the Pokémon card craze to “early trading for commodities brokers;” impoverished Poké-Mom Debra Galant writes of seeing her son “evolve from a Pokémon neophyte — getting taken in trades at camp — into a wheeler-dealer;” Baltimore Sun film critic Ann Hornaday refers to the Pokémon generation of “thieves, mercenaries and compulsive gamblers;” the aforementioned TIME authors mention young “cutthroat” Pokémon collectors who “slip into cunning and thuggery can stun a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer.”
“A few weeks ago,” in the words of an October 1999 New York Times article,
Parents from Long Island teamed up with class-action lawyers on both coasts in a lawsuit asserting that Pokémon cards constitute a form of illegal gambling no less addictive than, say, slot machines. That, the parents and their lawyers say, puts the cards in a different league from fads like Furby or Beanie Babies.
The perception of Pokémon as gambling for young children — as well more general concerns about distractions from schoolwork — led my elementary school and many others around the country to ban Pokémon. In some cases, these bans were in response to truly antisocial, criminal behavior. A few examples:
“After incidents such as one last month in Laval, in which a 12-year-old boy stabbed a 14-year-old in a dispute over the cards, local schools have started banning the cards.” (Montreal Gazette)
“In Bridgeport, Conn., a 9 year-old boy hid in a downtown store until it closed, tried to steal 44 packs of Pokemon cards… and, trapped in the locked store, called 911 for help.” (The New York Times)
Pokémon TCG publisher Wizards of the Coast regularly received “brown paper packages… stuffed with crumpled bills or gold necklaces and rings filched from Mom’s jewelry box” accompanied by notes with messages like “how many packs of Pokémon cards can I get for this solid gold brooch?” (The Stranger)
“Last week a nine-year-old boy on New York's Long Island stabbed an older schoolmate in a dispute over cards.” (TIME)
“Even adults are committing Pokémon violence,” writes the uncredited author of a December 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article titled “Pokémon Cards Create Wave of Pokémon Crimes.”
On Thursday, a North Carolina man was charged with assault for allegedly punching a Burger King cashier after he did not get a Pokémon toy with his meal. ‘There are Pokémon card sharks out there,’ said Philadelphia police officer Charlie Sarkioglu. ‘This is worse than the Cabbage Patch Kid craze because now it's the kids who are actually fighting each other instead of just the parents.’
A December 1999 New York Times article describes a police raid on a $1 million Pokémon card counterfeiting operation, a small fraction of the estimated $20 million Pokémon black market.
In probably the most extreme example of the Pokémon backlash in America, Pokémon — like contemporary children’s hit Harry Potter — was accused of promoting occult practices. In August 1999, two pastors at a Colorado church publicly burned Pokémon cards and, in the words of one observer, “ritually dismembered” Pokémon toys in front of dozens of children aged 6-12, leading their young congregants in a chant of “Burn it! Burn it! Chop it up!”
IV. Le Monde Entier
All of which makes it even more difficult to wait until the end of the year, when the phenomenon is finally expected to hit UK shops. You’ll just have to stave off your Poké-mania until then.
Alex Bickham, June 1999 Planet Game Boy article.
Pokémon became truly global in 1999. The Pokémon anime, for instance, started airing on British television in March;
Chilean television in April;
Brazilian television in May;
Mexican television in June;
South Korean television in July;
Cartoon Network Latinoamérica and German and Irish television in September;
Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Italian, Portuguese television in October; and
Spanish television in December.
It would expand to the Croatian, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Israeli, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian markets in 2000, and to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Thailand in 2001. It reached the globe’s last major market, the Indian subcontinent, in 2003.
As in the United States, the Pokémon phenomenon attracted controversy in these new markets. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, religious leaders spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about Pokémon as justification for banning it via fatwa. Nonetheless, Pokémon has conquered the globe and has kept all of its territories.
According to multiple sources, Pokémon is currently the world’s single most valuable media property, with more revenue than Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Call of Duty or Batman. Last year, Pokémon generated approximately $11.6 billion in revenue, significantly more than the total North American box office of $7.4 billion. As was once said of Alexander the Great, Pokémon has no worlds left to conquer.
VI. Epilogue: Let’s Go
Shares in Nintendo surged yesterday as investors absorbed the implications of a smartphone game that, within 24 hours of its launch, has crashed company servers, driven atheists to church and prompted road safety warnings by police. Pokémon Go, which sets players on a real-world treasure hunt for elusive digital monsters they can ‘catch’ via their phones, leapt to the top of the most-downloaded charts for both the Android and Apple mobile app stores in the US, Australia and New Zealand - countries where it made its debut on Thursday.
-Leo Lewis, 2016 Financial Times article
In the summer of 2016, more than twenty years after Red and Blue were first released, Pokémon returned headlines — and to controversy — with the meteoric rise of Pokémon Go. The augmented reality game cell phone game, which has been downloaded more than 620 million times at the time of writing, represents a new wave of Pokémon as a cultural phenomenon, complete with its own praise and backlash.
Apart from fears about unsafe driving, as seen in the above quote and American Safety Council graphic, the primary Pokémon Go controversies involved players venturing into — and sometimes trespassing on — dangerous or simply truly inappropriate locations. I present the following headlines with no comment:
Holocaust Museum to Visitors: Please Stop Catching Pokémon Here (Washington Post)
Never Forget to Play Pokémon Go At The 9/11 Memorial (Gothamist)
People are Now Playing Pokémon Go at Arlington Cemetery (Washington Post)
Pokémon No-Go: Hospital forced to ban gamers after Pokémon Go ‘gym’ is located in A&E department (The Sun)
Yes, You Can Catch Pokémon at Auschwitz (New York Magazine)
Trespassing in cemeteries; fatwas; ritual public burnings; schoolyard stabbings; counterfeiting; gambling; theft; class-action lawsuits; moral panic. Pokémon certainly inspired its share of negative reactions.
And, as we’ve seen, the positive, enthusiastic reaction has been just as extreme, enough to dethrone every other movie, video game or comics series ever created in terms of sheer revenue, enough to make Pokémon truly multicultural and multigenerational. As NYU sociology professor Todd Gitlin told the New York Times in 1999, “Kids value Pokémon in a hysterical, passionate way.” Or, to quote TIME again, “The four-to-12-year-old set can exhibit the most troubling fanaticism about Pokémon.”
About three years before his death, C.S. Lewis reviewed a biography of Rider Haggard, the British pop novelist whose adventure stories would later inspire Indiana Jones. “The vindictiveness with which adverse critics attacked him in his own day had, no doubt, some local and temporary causes,” Lewis writes. “But there was, and there always will be, a deeper cause. No one is indifferent to the mythopoeic. You either love it or else hate it with a perfect hatred.”
I would be the world’s most naive person if I didn’t attribute much of the Pokémon phenomenon to incredibly effective synergistic marketing. This marketing hype’s influence on impressionable young minds — and alienation of adults who just couldn’t avoid it — certainly explains much of the anti-Pokémon backlash. Of course Roger Ebert was critical after sitting through a movie he truly did not enjoy (and whose overall mythos he found perplexing) and the impoverished Poké-Mom had legitimate concerns about her son’s growing (and increasingly costly) obsession and elementary school principals were obliged to address distracting and occasionally antisocial behavior in the classroom and on the playground. The behavior of Pokémon ‘card sharks’ and counterfeiters and some collector-speculators can be simply explained by simple greed.
And, of course, contrarians will target anything popular; I’m old enough to remember the venom people had for Barney the Dinosaur in the late 1990s and for countless teen pop stars of the past 25 years.
But, as I’ve argued throughout this series, Pokémon’s ability to travel across space and time — and the sheer extremity of the reactions to it, both positive and negative — speak to its success as mythopoeia, as myth-making.
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King, Sharon R. “Mania for ‘Pocket Monsters’ Yields Billions for Nintendo.” New York Times, 26 April 1999.
Lee, Elizabeth. “Pokémon: TV monsters gobble big bucks.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 4 September 1998.
Lee, Felicia R. “Who’s Afraid of the Pokemon Monster?” New York Times, 24 October 1999.
Levin, Gary. “Notorious 'Pokemon' cartoon poised for fall.” USA Today, 11 June 1998.
Levin, Rick. “Pokémon Possessed.” The Stranger, 4 November 1999.
Lewis, Leo. “Nintendo surges on success of 'Pokemon Go' mobile game.” Financial Times, 9 July 2016.
Li, Kenneth. “Nintendo Putting 25M into Pokemon Promotion.” New York Daily News, 26 August 1998.
Lyman, Rick. “Pokémon is Catching, and Keeping, Them.” New York Times, 13 November 1999.
Meyer, George. “'Pokemon' movie trades on power of pride.” Sarasota Herald Tribune, 10 November 1999.
Morris, Wesley. “’Pokemon' packaged in life's big questions.” San Francisco Examiner, 10 November 1999.
Neff, Thomas Gibbons. “People are Now Playing Pokémon Go at Arlington Cemetery.” Washington Post, 12 July 2016.
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Pereira, Joseph. “Toys: Hasbro Hopes Japan’s ‘Pokemon’ Grabs U.S. Children.” Wall Street Journal, 26 May 1998.
Peterson, Andrea. “Holocaust Museum to Visitors: Please Stop Catching Pokémon Here.” Washington Post, 12 July 2016.
“Pokemon Cards Create Wave of Pokemon Crimes.” Salt Lake Tribune, 11 December 1999.
“Pokemon Movie Sets Record.” Chatham Daily News, 13 November 1999.
Pristin, Terry. “Moving to the Top of the Stocking: the Year’s Hot Toy? Anything Pokemon.” New York Times, 25 November 1999.
Rauzi, Robin. “Movie Review; All's Not Right in Pokemon World; The phenomenon from Japan hits the big screen, but what is this film saying to kids?” Los Angeles Times, 10 November 1999.
Robb, Guido. “Get ready for Japan's next wave: Pokemon.” St. Petersburgh Times, 4 September 1998.
“Saudi Arabia Bans Pokemon.” BBC News, 26 March 2001.
Shrieves, Linda. “VYING FOR POWER WITH RANGERS PARENTS DEAL WITH POWER RANGERS BY CONDONING THEM, BANNING THEM - OR FINDING A MIDDLE GROUND.” Orlando Sentinel, 14 April 1995.
Stanley, T.L. “Making Sure Digimon is ‘What’s Next’ at Retail.” Brandweek, 1 November 1999.
Strom, Stephanie. “Japanese Family Values: I Choose You, Pikachu!” New York Times, 7 November 1999.
Titcomb, James. “All systems Go for a virtual reality boom: The $1bn success of Pokémon Go was just the first wave for augmented reality, the technology's guru, John Hanke, tells James Titcomb.” Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2017.
Zdyrko, David. “Digimon World.” IGN, 5 July 2000.
Zenko, Darren. “Game Boy rides again as Japan's 'pocket monsters' get fired up for the biggest toy invasion since Godzilla; THE MENAGERIE; WHAT ABOUT THOSE SEIZURES?” Edmonton Journal, 3 October 1998.
Press Releases
“The Pokemon Phenomenon Continues with National Launch of the Pokemon Trading Card Game on January 9 & 10; Popular Pokemon Character Pikachu to Appear at Seattle Kickoff Event.” Business Wire, 7 January 1999.
“Pokemon Phenomenon Grows At Rapid Pace.” Business Wire, 21 July 1999.
“Viz Comics' Pokemon is America's #1 Comic!” PR Newswire, 4 August 1999.
Author’s Note: A very happy holiday season to all of my readers. See you in 2024.
This was so good!
This looks fascinating and comprehensive Robert! Saved to read later.